Language Trainers Blog

FreeRice is an excellent website that combines education and charity.  The concept is simple: answer a question correctly and the UN World Food Program will donate 10 grains of rice to a hungry family somewhere in the world.

FreeRice started out as an English vocabulary game.  They would show you a word and then give four possible definitions or synonyms.  Since then, they have added English grammar, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and several other subject areas like mathematics, chemistry, and geography.

The difficulty level automatically adjusts depending on whether you get the question right or wrong, so the more questions you get right, the harder it becomes.  A great feature is that it will tell you the correct answers to the questions you miss, and repeats them later on in the game - an excellent revision method.

The  highest English vocabulary level they use is 60.  I’ve gotten to a maximum of 50 the last few times I’ve played.  The most memorable word I’ve learned today is jalousie, which is a type of window blind.  I actually guessed the answer correctly, even though it looks like a terrible attempt at spelling ‘jealousy’.

There’s no minimum or maximum number of questions, so there’s no excuse for having no time to feed people in need.  See if you can get to the highest level in your area of expertise, or even better, in the language you’re studying.

They say that nothing is free, but the cost of this is hardly worth mentioning, and the benefits far outweigh the effort of pointing and clicking!

If you’ve ever had to type a handful of words in a foreign language, but don’t use that foreign language enough to warrant adding it to your computer’s language bar, then TypeIt.org may be what you’re looking for.

It has pages for twelve different languages, including a one that lets you type the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) symbols for English pronunciation. Unfortunately the keyboard shortcuts only work for Internet Explorer, but even without them, it’s a simple type/click, copy, paste scenario.

If you’re worried about getting your diacritics right, and don’t want to bother with using a character map, inserting a symbol, or changing your keyboard input language (and having to remember where the right keys are in the different layout), then check it out. It has character sets for Czech, French, German, Hungarian, IPA (English), Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.

Conclusions cannot always be drawn about historical connections. Some words are similar in numerous languages.  Linguistic research has led to the theory of an Ur-language (Indo-European) spoken some fifty thousand years ago, from which most other languages have descended. Papa, for example, is used for ‘father’ in seventy percent of languages across the world.

Meanwhile, essential latterday vocabulary has crossed languages as easily as the jet-setting executive who uses it:

Taxi is spelt and means the same in French, German, Swedish, Spanish, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch, Czech, Slovak, Portuguese, Hungarian and Romanian

Sauna is spelt and means the same in Finnish, English, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Dutch, Danish, Lithuanian, Croatian/Bosnian/Serbian, Romanian and Norwegian

Bank is spelt and means the same in Afrikaans, Amharic (Ethiopia), Bengali, Creole, Danish, Dutch, Frisian (Germany and Holland), German, Gujarati (India), Hungarian, Indonesian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Sinhala (Sri Lanka), Swedish and Wolof (Senegal and Gambia)

Hotel is spelt and means the same in Afrikaans, Amharic, Asturian (Spain), Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian/Bosnian/Serbian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Frisian (Germany and Holland), Galician (Spain), German, Icelandic, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Tswana (Botswana), Ukranian and Yiddish.

When it comes to personality, some people seem to have been put on the planet to make life easier for everyone else:

 
Cooperar: (Spansih, Central America) to go along willingly with someone else to one’s own disadvantage. 

Abozzare: (Italian) to accept meekly a far from satisfactory situation. 

Ilunga: (Tshiluba, Congo) someone who is ready to forgive any abuse the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time 

Flattering
 
Vaseliner: (French) to flatter (literally, to apply Vaseline) 

Happobijin: (Japanese) a beauty to all eight directions (a sycophant) 

Radfahrer: (German) one who flatters superiors and browbeats subordinates (literally, a cyclist) 

Fawning 

The Japanese have the most vivid description for hangers-on: kingyo no funi. It literally means ‘goldfish crap’ –a reference to the way that a fish that has defecated often trails excrement behind it for some time.

Specific numbers are used in some colloquial phrases:

Mettre des queues aux zeros (French) to add tails to noughts : to overcharge

Siete (Spanish, Central America) seven : a right-angled tear

Mein Rad hat eine Acht (German) my bike has an eight : a buckled wheel

Se mettre sur son trente et un (French) to put yourself on your thirty one : to get all dressed up

Ein Gesicht wie 37 Tage Regenwetter haben (German) to have a face like thirty-seven days of rain : a long face

English enjoys an interesting advantage over all other major European languages, having adopted natural in place of grammatical gender. In studying other European languages, students labour under the heavy burden of memorizing not just the meaning of each and every noun, but the gender, too.

In the Romance languages, for example, there are two genders, thus all nouns which would otherwise be neuter are either masculine or feminine. Some help in these languages is afforded by distinctive endings, which generally characterise the two classes. But even this aid is lacking in Germanic languages, where the distribution of these three genders appears to an English speaker to be mostly arbitrary.

Thus in German, Sonne (sun) is feminine, Mond (moon) is masculine, but Kind (child), Mädchen (maiden), and Weib (wife) are neuter. This distinction must be kept in mind constantly, since it affects not only the reference of pronouns, but also determines the rules of inflection and the agreement of adjectives.

In the English language, all of this was stripped away during the Middle English period.

Gender in modern English is determined by meaning. All nouns referring to living creatures are masculine or feminine according to the sex of the individual, and all other forms are seemingly neuter - though with indeclinable definite and indefinite articles and single-termination adjectives, our only clues are the pronouns.